How Social Marketing Contributed to Expanding Size of Overall Condom Markets in Ethiopia, Brazil, and Indonesia

Abstract

Background and Situation Analysis For more than 50 years, social marketing has been used to address a variety of health issues in the Global South, including the promotion and distribution of condoms for family planning and HIV prevention. Condom social marketers aim not just to increase sales of their own brands; they seek to increase demand for all condoms—whether it be through the commercial, non-profit or public sectors. The number of male condoms distributed through social marketing increased from 591 million in 27 countries in 1991 to more than 1.5 billion in 66 countries in 2020. Concurrent with this growth in the number of countries, the size of the condom markets also grew in most, if not all, of those countries. Target Audience(s) The primary audiences of condom social marketing programs are low income and high-risk populations in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. They often focus on young people and high risk groups—such as sex workers and their partners, injecting drug users, soldiers, and migrant workers—who do not always have reliable access to affordable condoms. As condom social marketing programs mature, they often use market segmentation to add higher priced condoms aimed at middle-income and even higher-income consumers, and the profits are used to “cross-subsidize” the lower-priced brands. Behavioral Objective To increase purchase and use of condoms, particularly with low-income people and certain high risk individuals (such as young people, commercial sex workers, injecting drug users and men who have sex with men), by selling them through a wide variety of sales outlets at highly subsidized prices. Strategy The authors examined mature condom social marketing programs in Ethiopia, Brazil and Indonesia where the growth in condom social marketing was accompanied by similar growth of the total condom market. They looked at the evolution and sales of these three programs, and the larger condom universes in those countries. The authors were interested to know if social marketing programs help expand the larger condom markets, and not just grow sales of their own products. Results Based on the evidence, the authors believe that these three programs contributed significantly to creating larger markets even though there were surely other forces at work (such as changes in government policy or fears of being infected with HIV). This article adds to the limited literature on the effect of successful condom social marketing programs on their broader markets. Recommendations for Social Marketing Practice The authors make five recommendations for social marketers interested in replicating the success of these programs: 1) keeping one product in each product category highly affordable, 2) applying market segmentation through cross-subsidization, 3) showing flexibility in distribution, 4) pushing the limits on behavior change communication, and 5) building the product category (Neugaard, 2008).